Catching Up With Unfinished Van Tangents: Parte the First

It’s been a crazy couple months for Van Full of Candy as you may or may not have noticed. Both members are now freshly moved from their previous addresses, having relocated a total of nearly 400 miles. We’re both on the tale end of transitioning from a bullshit existence, to a slightly different bullshit existence. But the point of this is change, moving forward, letting go of the past and scarring the future with our poison infused projectile bile and razor sharp laser tipped talons… Metaphorically.

Since starting this business almost a year and a half ago we’ve posted nearly 300 articles. Over that time often I’ve started an article, found a story that I wanted to explore, but for one reason or another abandoned, fully meaning to go back to it and revisit it, but never getting around to it. So in the spirit of burying the past in a shallow, road side grave and moving onto the quivering future, frightened of the legend of our power which precedes us, I have decided to dig up all of my half finished thoughts and unrealized articles, spill them all out here and start fresh moving forward. So, let’s do that then, I suppose, since I just said I would…

I even still have a mock up of the letter head… Lazy ass…

My first abandoned post from 4/12/11 is simply titled “UFOs”. Most of my draft articles are untitled, sort of making this one special. What also makes this one special is that aside from the title, there is nothing else in the post. There’s usually a link reminding me what I wanted to talk about for when I DO get back to it. In this case, I apparently thought I would have no problem remembering what random UFO topic I was so excited about two Aprils ago. But as often as I write about space and the people that live there wanting to kill us, that seems irresponsible of me. I believe it had something to do with the anniversary of Roswell, and I was going to do a mock up of the newly released documents celebrating said anniversary… I think. Needless to say, it would have been hilarious… Delete.

Next, last edited August 4th 2011: “A Generation Waiting For Dad to Come Home”. I remember this one. I was very angry with you for some reason. Probably not YOU specifically, but the royal “you”. Including me apparently. This rant went a little something like this:

“I don’t mean any of this personally, I’m not here to point out anything that I don’t also know applies as much, if not more so, to myself. I’m part of the generation waiting for dad to come home. I’m the poster boy for a decade or two of men and women who are now in their quarter to mid life and are still drifting, waiting, praying, screaming for someone to tell them what to do, where to go, how to be, when to act and when to just shut the fuck up and go away. We are not the most irresponsible generation. We are the product of the most irresponsible generation. And we’re making the next one. And if that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, I’m not surprised.”

Now, I’m not sure what you did to upset me so much, but I was clearly unhappy about something. The next piece gives me a little more insight on the source of my rage though:

“Maybe it’s where I grew up, maybe it’s where I am now. Maybe I’m just seeing a concentrated sample of something that isn’t nearly as prevalent as I fear it is. I doubt it. I know this doesn’t apply to everyone in this demographic, but it applies to the great many of us that I’ve observed. I look around me and I see a sea of dudes and bros, chicks and babes and people who have never really known want or hardship, yet know a boundless sense of self importance and entitlement. A great many of you are reading this right now on a box of magic that fits comfortably in the palm of your hand. Technology that our very recent ancestors could never have dreamed of. But it’s not enough for us. For some reason, we’ve been handed everything that the greatest thinkers of all of human creation could ever be laughed at for imagining, and it’s not good enough, we somehow feel entitled to more, without having earned even a fraction of what we have already.”

What passes for esteem in the “Generation Waiting For Dad to Come Home”

This seems to be pretty clearly influenced by my level of hatred for, but not limited to, the hollow, empty, entitled, worthless denizens of Hollywood California USA. One of the reasons I’ve found myself back in Sacramento now is my fear that if I were to remain in Hollywood for much longer I would simply implode in a brilliant flash of purple light, opening a tear in space time which would almost instantaneously swallow the whole of the universe. And while I wouldn’t normally have a problem with that, saying it out loud just makes it sound selfish.

“We are a developmentally stunted narcissistic gaggle of preening assholes.”

I do believe this about the generations adjacent me. I say adjacent, as in my research, I’ve found that I somehow fall in a gap between Gen X and Gen Y, an empty sliver of time that classification seems to have forgot. I guess that’s what makes it easy for me to lob hate grenades as willy nilly as I do, looking in from the outside at all the stupidity while probably deep down inside just wishing I could belong to anything, no matter how stupid…

“And the problem with a vacuum of power and leadership, is how easily those without direction are steered and controlled.”

And here it looks like I was about to get into the political implications of a Generation Waiting For Dad to Come Home. The need for a father figure leading us to blind, lazy destruction at the hands of anyone who will scare us enough to get us to follow them. Oh, what a glorious, indignant, pointless rant on the lazy ineptitude of me and my peers it would have been… I’m glad I didn’t do more, I’m depressed just reading what I have here… Deleted.

And finally, for part 1:

“It takes a special man to wear a mustache, a brave man.”

This piece from September 22, 2011, was apparently going to be some sort of backhanded tribute to the American Mustache Institute’s “Robert Goulet Award”, which celebrates great achievements in mustachery and mustachioed Americans. My guess is that seemed to be too much of a one note joke for me to do an article on, which is probably why just 5 weeks later we embarked on Movember: an entire month dedicated to the celebration of the face shrub… Makes sense.

So, as this has gone longer than I expected, I will have to pick this up again later, continuing to do some spring cleaning here at VFoC as we return to the grind that IS online humorism. Hope you all find your way back here, we’ve got some fun things on the horizon.